I am Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Heartland Institute, Senior Advisor for Entitlement Reform and Budget Policy at the National Tax Limitation Foundation, General Counsel for the American Civil Rights Union, and Senior Fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. I served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George H.W. Bush. I am a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb (New York: Harper Collins, 2011).
I write about new, cutting edge ideas regarding public policy, particularly concerning economics.

The Coming Revelation Of The 'Global Warming' Fraud Resembles The Obamacare Lie

The second shoe is preparing to drop to shatter the world view of so-called Progressives. Coming, global revelations will demonstrate the fraud behind the theory of man-caused, catastrophic, global warming, just like the real world has shattered the falsehoods behind Obamacare.

That is because the underlying reason for both frauds was the same: to expand government power. Enablers went along with the fraud in both cases for the same underlying reason – political correctness. In both cases, going along with the cause for the assumed public good without raising questions was considered the politically correct thing to do for all “good” people. Soon the enablers in both cases will have to pay the price for participating in and perpetuating the fraud.

“They said if you liked your insurance you could keep your insurance—but that’s not true. It was never true! They said if you liked your doctor you could keep your doctor—but that’s not true. It was never true! They said they would cover everyone who needed it, and instead people who had coverage are losing it—millions of them! They said they would make insurance less expensive—but it’s more expensive! Premium shock, deductible shock. They said don’t worry, your health information will be secure, but instead the whole setup looks like a hacker’s holiday. Bad guys are apparently already going for your private information.”

That could have been drawn precisely from my commentary in this space last week.

The fact that Obamacare was always about power and not people is perfectly illustrated by the case of California resident Edie Littlefield Sundby. Since her gall bladder cancer was discovered 7 years ago, her private insurance company, United Healthcare, has spent $1.2 million to save her life. Edie explains that the insurance company, “has never once questioned any treatment or procedure recommended by my medical team. The company pays a fair price to the doctors and hospitals, on time, and is responsive to the emergency treatment requirements of late-stage cancer. Its caring people in the claims office have been readily available to talk to me and my providers.”

But Obamacare is driving United Health Care out of business altogether in California. So Edie is one of millions who have recently received an insurance cancellation letter, effective December 31. Just go to the Covered California Obamacare Exchange, which is working just as intended Obama has said, and get your Obamacare, “progressive” Obama apologists say. But there is no insurance on the highly touted Covered California Obamacare Exchange that includes coverage for the team of doctors that have kept her alive for a period with just a 2% probability, who range from her hometown of San Diego, to Stanford University in northern California, to Houston. Even though United Healthcare did, for an affordable price, before Obamacare.

But the response from the Obama White House has not been “progressive” concern for Edie. Instead, White House operatives have disparaged her. Now that the federal government has raised spending, taxes, and regulatory burdens by trillions to take over health care, the “progressives” are not worried about Edie.

Similarly, the theory of man-caused, catastrophic, global warming is embraced not because of any “science,” (that sham is for the “useful idiots,”), but because it is a justification for a government takeover of the energy industry, with massive increases in regulation, taxes and government spending. The United Nations loves it because it inspires fantasies of the UN growing up to be a world government, with real government powers of global taxation, spending and regulation, all “to save the planet.” Scientists who go along with the cause are rewarded not only with praise for their worthy social conscience, but also with altogether billions in hard, cold cash (government and environmental grants), for their cooperation in helping to play the “useful idiots.” Moreover, many academic scientists are “progressives” themselves, and so favor sharp increases in government spending, taxes and regulation, because they are certain they know how to run your life better than you do.

That is what the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is all about. On September 27, the IPCC issued the final version of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) for its fifth comprehensive Assessment Report (AR-5) since 1992 on the supposed science of anthropogenic, catastrophic, global warming. But the IPCC has intellectual competition now. A peer group of independent, private sector scientists has organized the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). Earlier in September, the NIPCC issued its own comprehensive, voluminous report on the science of climate change, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science, published by the Heartland Institute.

If you are a true believer in anthropogenic, catastrophic, global warming, you don’t know what you are talking about unless you also have at least looked through the hundreds of pages of calm, dispassionate science in Climate Change Reconsidered II, which also reviews the peer-reviewed literature on climate change. Go ahead, I dare you. What are you afraid of?

Now 4 lead contributing authors of Climate Change Reconsidered II, Drs. Craig Idso, Robert Carter, S. Fred Singer, and Willie Soon, have issued a Scientific Critique of IPCC’s 2013 “Summary for Policymakers.” They find that “the new SPM reveals the IPCC has retreated from at least 11 alarmist claims promulgated in its previous reports or by scientists prominently associated with the IPCC. The SPM also contains at least 13 misleading or untrue statements, and 11 further statements that are phrased in such a way that they mislead readers or misrepresent important aspects of the science.”

For example, the authors report, “The IPCC concedes for the first time that a 15 year long period of no significant warming occurred since 1998 despite a 7% rise in carbon dioxide (CO2).” The authors explain, “The statement represents a significant revision in the IPCC thinking, because their concern about dangerous warming rests upon the assumption that temperature increases will proceed in parallel fashion with CO2 increases.” Climate Change Reconsidered II documents that the same official temperature records used by the IPCC going back over 100 years, and proxy temperature records going back deep into the geologic time scale, show that temperatures have not changed in parallel with CO2 levels.

Central to the IPCC’s argument for anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming is its dozens of global climate models and their projections of growing global temperatures over time. But the SPM now concedes that these models have failed to project the now admitted lack of warming over the last 15 years. The draft of the SPM circulated in June stated quite accurately that the “Models do not generally reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10 to 15 years.” The final draft released in September covers the same by saying, “There are…differences between simulated and observed trends over periods as short as 10 to 15 years (e.g., 1998 to 2012).”

Nevertheless, despite this failure of the underlying climate models, the SPM states, “It is extremely likely that human influence on climate caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951–2010.” The prior Assessment Report issued in 2007 had said that this human contribution to global warming was only “very likely.” So as the IPCC climate models admittedly diverge from reality, the IPCC conclusion is that the human contribution to global warming (which it admits has not been happening for quite a while now) is only all the more likely.

Indeed, the models have not been validated by past recorded temperatures, and, therefore, cannot be a sound basis for costly regulation to counter global warming, as President Obama’s EPA is now pursuing. As the NIPCC’s recent report states, “We conclude the current generation of global climate models are unable to make accurate projections of climate even 10 years ahead, let alone the 100 year period that has been adopted by policy planners. The output of such models should therefore not be used to guide public policy formulation until they have been validated and shown to have predictive value.”

The SPM also concedes that the Antarctic ice cap “increased…(by) 1.2%–1.8% per decade between 1979 and 2012.” So even the UN’s IPCC now concedes that the South Pole’s ice cap has been increasing all along, rather than melting. The increase in Antarctic sea ice now totals about 1 million square kilometers. In fact, the extent of Antarctic sea ice is now the greatest ever measured.

Arctic sea ice has historically fluctuated in regular cycles. While it did decline during the 1978 to 1998 period, that decline has now reversed, falsifying alarmist predictions that the North Pole would be free of ice by 2013. Globally, some glaciers have been melting and receding. Others have been growing and expanding. Overall, the total extent of global sea ice has not been declining at any enhanced rate since the end of the Little Ice Age around 150 years ago.

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